Psalm 73; A Psalm for the Doubting

Jason Sterling May 24, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL 

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Transcript

Welcome And Church Announcements

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Want to add or take this opportunity to welcome you and to especially welcome those who are visiting with us this morning. Really glad that you're here on this holiday weekend. If you look, if you're on the inside aisle, you'll see in the pew in front of you, you'll see a black registration pad. We would love for you to sign in this morning, especially if you're a guest with us today. We would love some information so that we can thank you for your visit. You'll also see in there a uh card uh at the top of the registration pad that gives information on some things going on in the life of our church and the ways that you can get involved. And so I hope that you'll look at that, maybe take a picture of it if you're visiting with us and uh get involved in our church and get connected here. Also, you'll see in your bulletin uh next Sunday, all families 7th through 12th grade, make sure you join our student ministry staff in the student ministry space next Sunday, May the 31st, after the second worship service, there will be a family lunch and parents meeting where you'll be able to meet our new interns, uh, interact with the staff, and also hear about the things that are going on this summer that will also give you an opportunity to ask any questions that you have about our summer activities in our student ministry. The other thing I want to mention, I've done this a few times, but as as you think about preparing for worship and preparing for Sundays, I've said this one just real practical way to prepare for Sunday mornings is uh read the passage uh before you walk in here that we'll be preaching on. And the bulletin is posted uh on the website. It's also in our newsletter, The Pilgrimage. If you're not signed up for the newsletter, call the church office, we'll get you signed up. But if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see church bulletin, and it'll have the passage. And I think it's really helpful just to simply do that before coming here on Sunday morning. The other thing is if you're on Spotify, uh we have a tune, my heart. Uh, you'll, if you type that in in the search engine, you will find all of the songs that Kirk who posts there, the songs that we'll be singing in our worship service. And so give that a listen. He posts them early so you can be listening to those throughout the week as well. Just a couple of ways to real practically engage your heart in worship even before you get here on Sundays. If you have a copy of God's word, turn with me to the book of Psalms. So, not Romans, uh Psalms. So go to the center of your Bible, turn to Psalm 73. For the past several months, we've been looking

Why Psalm 73 Matters

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at the book of Romans, and as I was thinking about Romans, it's such an amazing book. I don't want to rush it. Um I want to let Romans breathe a little bit, and we will pick Romans back up with chapter 9, and we'll finish it in the fall. And so for the past few summers, if you've been around, you know that we've been working our way through the Psalms. I've made a list, and I think we've made our way in the last few years through about 60 Psalms. So we have 90 more. Uh, and so we've got a few more summers as we make our way through the Psalms. And this summer we're gonna focus on what I'm calling the honest prayers of Scripture, the series Honest with God. Because these psalms that we're gonna look at this summer, uh they don't clean it up before they bring it to God. They ask hard questions. The psalmists voice their pain. Sometimes it sounds like a desperate plea rather than a polished prayer. And so, with that in mind, let's look at our first psalm of the summer, Psalm 73. This is God's word. Truly, God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked, for they have no pangs until death, their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are, they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore, pride is their necklace, violence covers them as a garment, their eyes swell out through fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice loftily, they threaten oppression, they set their mouths against the heavens and their tongues struts through the earth. Therefore, his people turn back to them and find no fault in them, and they say, How can God know as their knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the wicked, always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence, for all the day long I have been strickened and rebuked every morning. If I had said, I will thus, I will speak thus, I would have betrayed the generation of your children. But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task until I went into the sanctuary of God, and then I discerned their end. Truly you set them in slippery places, you make them fall in ruin, how they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors, like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms. When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant, I was like a beast towards you. Nevertheless, I am continually with you. You hold my right hand, you guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there's nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold, those who are far from you shall perish. You put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you. But for me it is good to be near God. I have made the Lord God my refuge that I might tell of all your works. This is God's word. Let's pray. Ask for the Spirit to help us this morning. Bow with me. Father, we're here, and we are asking you to speak, O Lord, speak. Speak to each and every heart here. I cannot do that, only you can do that through your spirit. And so please come help us to

Certainty Can Block Insight

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encounter God through his word, the Lord Jesus, and all of his grace and glory. Be with us in Jesus' name. Amen. There's a kind of certainty that feels like faith, but isn't. I read an article a couple of weeks ago about a therapist, he's from New York, Jonathan Albert. And he in his article, he talked about a patient who came in to his office and was really furious with a friend. And what started out as ordinary disappointment, a canceled dinner and a text return just a bit too late, had grown into something toxic and something much larger. Because now the friend was toxic and the hurt was now elevated to trauma. And the patient arrived with screenshots, fully constructed case for the prosecution and for her therapist. What this person didn't have was introspection. They'd stopped being curious about their own heart and stopped asking questions that had actually might lead to help and actually might lead to change. Questions like, could this carelessness with the friend could had it have simply been carelessness rather than cruelty? Questions like, what role did I maybe play in this? You see, the language she brought into the room gave her something powerful. Yes, it gave her certainty. But as Albert put it, certainty is often the enemy of insight. The therapy had made her story clearer without making her stronger. And then listen to how he diagnoses the broader culture. Very blunt. We have become emotionally articulate while growing psychologically brittle. In other words, he's saying we've never been better at explaining our pain and our experience, yet we have rarely been worse at being changed by it. You see, what we're not very good at, and it goes all the way back to Genesis chapter 3, is the older, harder, more honest question, the one about ourselves. An ancient songwriter named Asaph. The writer of Psalm 73 walked right into that question. He wasn't just a struggling newcomer. He was one of David's chief musicians. He was a mature worship leader. He was head of the entire clan of the temple singers, and he opened Psalm 73 with a confession that is shocking from someone like him. I have almost lost my faith, he says, not because he almost he stopped believing in God, but because life seemed unfair. He was, in Albert's words, emotionally articulate, and yet he was growing brittle by the day. And then something happened. He started to see more clearly. And let's look at Psalm 73 and let's see what he sees and what happened next. Three things this morning: the grievance, the sanctuary, the return. The grievance, the sanctuary, the return. Look at our first heading, the grievance. Look at verse 1. Well, again, we'll just walk through the scripture. Truly, or some translations say, surely, which I think is good, surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. And that sounds like confidence when you first hear it, but listen, it

The Grievance And The Envy

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is not, if you think about the psalm that we just read, it's not an easy affirmation of someone whose life is going well. That is a hard-won confession of someone who almost didn't make it to that sentence. And Asaph begins with his conclusion because the rest of the psalm, in between those bookends, of God is good, he's going to show us how he almost ended up in a different place. Verse 2, he says, I nearly lost my faith. Why did he almost lose his faith? Look at verse 3. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. And so the people who wanted nothing to do with God, they were doing just fine. Thank you very much. They don't get sick. They aren't plagued with trouble and suffering. They have resources. They have influence. They have confidence. And don't be sidetracked by the word wicked. It's a strong word, and in our minds, we can immediately go to an extreme and think of a monster of some sort. But asaph means something ordinary here and something more unsettling. It is, in reference to the wicked, it is people who live as though God is irrelevant to their life and how they live their life. He's not talking about monsters. He's talking about perfectly pleasant people who are quite successful, who have arranged their entire life without reference to God, and nothing happens to them. Look at verses four through twelve. You see his constructed case. And the heavens don't fall. And Asaph says in verse 13, God, look at me. I've tried to be faithful to you. My heart, I've tried to keep it clean. I've been faithful all the day long, and all you have done is plague me and punish me every morning. That's the feeling. And he's not wrong about the facts. Because you live in the same world I do. We see that every single day, don't we? The wicked do sometimes prosper, and the righteous often suffer. And so Asaph is describing something very real. Very real in this room this morning. Because we all have our own versions of this, don't we? You've been faithful in your marriage, and yet someone else walked away from theirs. No consequences, no fallout, no reckoning, just a fresh start. You run your own business with integrity. You're a good employee. You're a hard worker. You don't cut corners, you don't take shortcuts, you do everything the right way. You don't get the callback. You don't get the business. You don't get the promotion. You feel this? Or maybe for you, it's you're doing the math. And gas is over $4 a gallon. And you're on a tight budget. And you're doing everything you can just to make it through the month. While everybody around you who could care less about God is planning their next big trip. And maybe you've been praying for a baby. You've been faithful in your marriage. You've been faithful in your faith. And the answer does not come. And you can think of all sorts of people. Maybe you work with them, maybe you live next to them, who aren't praying, who don't think of God, who don't really even want a baby. And yet they get pregnant without a second thought. You hear it? That's this psalm. This is Asaph's exact cry. All in vain I have kept my heart pure. The faithful are suffering, the indifferent are thriving, and God appears to care less and do nothing about it. But here's what I want you to see. What starts out as an honest observation, look at what it quietly becomes in Asaph's heart. Not confusion, not doubt, not theological struggle. One word, verse three, envy. He looked at what they had and he wanted it. And what starts out at this legitimate grievous grievance starts to become poison inside of his soul. Imagine that I were to knock over this bowl of water here on the communion table. There would be water on the floor. Why would there be water on the floor? That's not a trick question. Because there's water in the bowl. It was there to begin with. Me knocking it over didn't create it. It just revealed what was already there. The prosperity of the wicked did not create the envy in Asaf's heart. It knocked over the bowl. It should show him what was deep down inside of him. And what was inside was envy, and it was moving deep inside of his soul so that he started to rewrite everything he believed about God. That's what's happening. And I think that's worth sitting with for a moment. You came in in this morning, maybe carrying a real grievance. And please hear me say, a real grievance. I'm not dismissing that. The marriage, the business, the finances, the baby, those aren't small things. But the psalm is pressing you deeper. The psalm is pressing you harder than whatever grievance you have that is legitimate. The psalm is asking, what is that grievance doing to you? What is it producing in you? Envy has a way of feeling like justice. And ASAF is about to show us the only place we can go and be healed and get our questions answered and actually live free. And that's where he takes us next to the sanctuary. Look with me at the next point. And he gets to the sanctuary, and something else happens first that I think it's really easy to miss. And this is the thing that you know I'm always telling you things that stood out to me. This is the thing that stood out to me this week. Look at verse 15. Again, easy to miss. He's on the verge of

The Sanctuary Changes Perspective

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saying something out loud that he has been thinking. And then he stops himself. And again, the New International Version here, I love it. It says, if I had spoken out like that, I would have betrayed your children. Whoa. So let's stop with that just for a second because I think that's really interesting. Notice what stops him. Not a better argument, not a theological correction, a concern for the people around him. More specifically, a concern for younger, weaker believers who would be damaged by his public unraveling. And so in his darkest moments, something in him turned outward, just a small turn. You know, when we feel things like this, if you're anything like me, I'd turn inward on myself. He starts to turn outward, and that's where the doubt begins to crack. That's profound. We don't have time to spend a lot of time here, but the temptation is when you're in pain, is to make sure everyone knows it, to go public, to build the case and build it out loud. But ASAP discovers something that in the moment stopped him from being consumed entirely by his pain. And it was he felt something for the people around him, and something began to shift. Not everything, not all at once, but the grip of the grievance started to loosen just a bit. If you're in a dark place this morning, that's worth paying attention to. Getting your eyes off yourself, even subtly, even briefly, is sometimes when it cracks open and when God starts to move and do his work. Verse 17. One of the most important verses really in the entire book of Psalms, until I entered the sanctuary, then I discerned therein. This is the turning point. He goes into the presence of God, he goes into corporate worship, into the place where God's people gathered, and it's here. It's there in the sanctuary that things start to break through. What does he understand? Well, he starts to see more clearly. He starts to see the big picture. Look at verse 18. Truly, you set them, notice you set them in slippery places, you make them fall into ruin. Notice this is a reference back to verse 2. Asaph's the one said his feet were slipping. Now he starts to see in the presence of God who it is that is really slipping. And it's the wicked. The sanctuary inverted everything. What looked like, from his perspective, where he stood on the ground, it looked like they were winning. But from where God stands, that starts to shift. The sanctuary didn't give Asaph new facts, it gave him new eyes. And so when he starts to see in the sanctuary, he starts to see that God was not absent, that God had not left the building, that he was sovereign the whole time, that he is writing a story that looks very different from above than it does on the ground. Think about the sanctuary and what it actually is. Think about the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, the sanctuary was not just a building, it was the place where heaven and earth overlapped, where God's throne room touched the ground. And Asaph walked in, and he wasn't just changing his location. He was getting a different perspective. He was changing his vantage point. You see, he was looking down here at the wicked and at the ledger and how things were not fair. Then he goes into the sanctuary and he starts to see more clearly, and his eyes are lifted up. If you have done much flying and travel, you will know that on a day like today, for example, you arrive at the airport, it's overcast, the skies are flat and heavy, you board the plane, you take off. And you ever had this experience? Once you get above the clouds, it's like, whoa, the sun is coming right through your window and it is blinding you and it is blazing. It had always been there. Clouds didn't extinguish it. You just couldn't see it. You couldn't see it from your perspective on the ground. That is what the sanctuary did for Asaph. The circumstances hadn't changed. The wicked were still prospering. The injustice was real, but worship lifted him above the clouds long enough to see what was actually true. That is what we're doing here every Sunday morning. We're not just filling out a commitment card, checking a box on, I attended church this week. We're recrowd, we are recalibrating our souls and our hearts. Because think about the week pulls us down here, and our eyes are fixed on our circumstances and on our ledger and on our problems and on how life isn't fair. And we come here on Sunday mornings and our eyes get lifted up again, and we're reminded of what is true when everything out there during the week, starting tomorrow morning bright and early, will tell you otherwise. You cannot think your way out of Asaph's perspective that he found. You can't think your way out of it. Look at verse 16. He tried that. And it actually made it worse. You can only enter into it. You can only come here. You sing what is true, even when you don't feel like singing, and when you don't really think it's true. You hear the word read and you hear it proclaimed over your circumstances. You come to this table every single week. Because it's here that we remember the real story and who's really in charge, and who is really actually writing the story. Hebrews chapter 10 tells us not to give up meeting together, especially as the pressure mounts, not because uh there's anything special about the space, but it's because God meets us here. And it's because here is where the reordering happens. This is where you come to get above the clouds. Lastly, the return. Look at what Asaph does when the reordering happens. I think this is interesting as well. He doesn't immediately go to gratitude, he doesn't immediately go to praise, even honest examination. That's where he starts. Look

The Return And God Holding You

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at verse 21 and 22. When my soul was embittered, so he names it. He doesn't minimize what he felt. Then how about this one? I was brutish. I was an animal. Ignorant. I was like a beast towards you. That's what envy does to our souls. And that's what it had made Asaph. Verse 23. Maybe the sweetest words in this psalm. Nevertheless. Nevertheless. Yet, everything turns here. Not I fixed myself and then God accepted me. Not I cleaned up my case. And then I came back. Yet, despite the beast, despite the envy, despite the feet that almost slipped. Yet, I am always with you. Please don't miss this. Who's the faithfulness dependent on? It's all one-sided in this verse. Asaph didn't hold on to God through his doubt. God held on to him through his doubt. Asaph could only see dimly. We live this side of the cross, and so we see clearly, don't we? The curtain has been torn. The access that Asaf found entering into the temple, we have through Jesus who opened up the way of the presence of God once and for all. We don't come to a building, we come to Him. We come to Jesus through His Spirit. The only reason God can say, nevertheless, nevertheless, I am with you, nevertheless, I hold you, nevertheless, I will not let you go, is because of Jesus. Because he absorbed it in our place. Jesus took the verdict that our fully constructed case against God deserved. And he didn't escape. He stayed on a cross so that the nevertheless could be true for people like Asaph and for people like you and me. Finally, verses 25 and 26. You've heard this verse, perhaps over the years, whom have I in heaven but you? Earth has nothing I desire besides you, my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. That's the whole psalm. Right there in one verse. A man who spent verse after verse in envy now desires nothing but God. This isn't resignation. This isn't a man who has stopped wanting things. This is a man who actually found what he was actually hungry for all along. The envy wasn't really about their health and their wealth and their ease. It was a misdirected hunger for something only God could give. And when he finally found it, really found it, everything else started to loosen its grip. Not because they stopped mattering, but because the hunger underneath, the envy, had finally found what it was actually looking for. And nothing, this is what he's saying, nothing compares to that. Some of you are here today and you have a fully constructed case. Against God, against life, against someone who's hurting you, against circumstances that you find yourself in. The case might be true, the facts might be real. But there are two things that you can do with that case. You can maintain it, you can polish it, you can add to it, you can build it higher. Or you can bring it here. Bring it into this room, into the presence of the one who holds you by the right hand. Even when you do not feel it, even when you've been a brute beast, even when you feel like you have almost lost your faith and your feet have slipped, yet he is always with you. That is where this prayer ends and lands. Not with answers, not with resolved circumstances, but with something better than certainty, something that is actually strong enough to hold you. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Not a better case, a better treasure. And that treasure is Jesus. Will you come to him this morning? Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you are our strength and you're our inheritance forever. Would you forgive us for the cases that we've built against you, for the grievances that we've polished and protected instead of bringing them to you? Holy Spirit, would you help us to lift our eyes up? Do you recalibrate our souls, reorder us, give us the grace to see that you are so much better. In Jesus' name. Amen.